


Flashes From a Brighter Time

by flowercrownremus



Series: Like a Wilderland [1]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Discussion of Abortion, Gen, Implied/Referenced Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, M/M, Mentions of Racism, Remus Raises Harry AU, Suicidal Thoughts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-16
Updated: 2015-01-16
Packaged: 2018-03-07 19:20:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,187
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3180167
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/flowercrownremus/pseuds/flowercrownremus
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>1986:  After Harry's power starts manifesting, the Dursleys want nothing more to do with him.  Dumbledore decides to find someone better suited to raising him.</p><p>  <i>“I thought perhaps you might raise Harry.”</i></p><p>  <i>“Me?”</i></p><p>  <i>“Who better?  I had my reasons for sending him to the home of his relatives, but I am not so hard-headed an old man that I can’t admit when a plan is not working.”</i></p>
            </blockquote>





	Flashes From a Brighter Time

“Ah, Remus, there you are,” Dumbledore says from the other side of the pig pen, watching Remus slop feed into the trough for the sows. “I do hope I'm not interrupting.”

A thrill comes to Remus at the sight of Dumbledore, standing there in a Muggle family’s field in Wales, with his plum robes and his long beard, unchanged by the years that have passed since the war. The air carries a glimmer of magic just from his presence. Remus has not lived among wizards in a long time, has, in truth, barely lived among humans, finding what work he can on farms and in sparse Muggle towns as a day laborer, itinerant, sleeping in fields and forests when the meager money he’d earned from selling his father’s cottage ran out, and on full moon nights, he fastened thick silver chains around his wrists and his waist and bound himself to tree trunks and in the stables of barns and once to the support beams of an abandoned boathouse on the beach, and woke in a haze of pain, with limbs dislocated and blood wetting the ground beneath him. All the new scars, new skin, new muscles grown hard from farmwork, carry him halfway to feeling like a new person. His hair’s more gray than brown now. He looks old.

But here’s Dumbledore, blue eyes twinkling, and Remus is eleven again and being told he will be allowed to go to Hogwarts after all. He is eighteen and fighting a war. He is twenty-one and being asked, again and again and again, if he helped to kill his best friends.

“Has something happened?” Remus asks. “Has Voldemort — ”

The smile fades from Dumbledore’s lips. “No, nothing like that, I assure you. Are you able to leave your, ah, charges — ” The pigs snort into their feed, their purplish ears flapping against one another. “ — just for a moment? Perhaps we might have a cup of tea?”

“Yes, of course. Just let me … ” Remus climbs over the fence. His hands are brown with muck and there is pig shit on his trousers. He rinses his hands and face under the nearby pump, the water so cold his fingers go numb, and only remembers afterward that he could’ve used his wand. Dumbledore kindly says nothing.

In the barn Dumbledore sits on a workbench and accepts the cup of tea Remus hands him — magically heated this time — waving a hand to show his unconcern when Remus explains, “I've only got bags, I'm afraid.” The horses turn their heads in their stables at the sound of Remus’s voice, and the mare, Rosie, blinks her big eye at them before turning away.

“I never cared for horses, myself,” Dumbledore says. “I was kicked by one as a child. I admit I had something of a lingering fear of centaurs thereafter, but of course, a little wariness is not so terrible a thing around centaurs, provided it’s tempered with a good deal of respect.” He sips at his tea. “Strong. You haven’t got a sugar lump or two lying about, have you?”

Remus pulls a couple from the tin and hands them to Dumbledore. He waits as Dumbledore stirs his tea with his wand, and, sipping once more, says, “Good, good.” He fixes his gaze on Remus. “Now, Mr. Lupin, I'm afraid I bring you bad news, but I hope also good news.” Remus, sitting on a stool, holding a glass of water, doesn't reply. He still smells the dung on his boots. “I am sorry, I know I've given you enough bad news to last a lifetime, much more than any man as young as you — ”

“It's fine,” Remus interrupts. He does not want to talk about that. “What's happened? Do you need me to go on missions again?”

“No, the matter I need to discuss with you today concerns young Harry.”

His heart swoops in his chest. “Harry?”

“Harry Potter.”

There are no other Harrys, of course, not to Remus. Still, he hadn’t expected to hear his name. It is not true that he has not thought of the boy, but like James and Lily and Peter, Harry is frozen in memory, an unchanging laughing baby in photographs, held in the arms of his forever-young parents; he forgets sometimes that Harry is not dead. He must be six by now — just turned six, in fact, mere days ago.

“Is he safe?”

“He’s safe, I promise. For the moment. However — ” Dumbledore sips at his mug, but Remus knows the grim set of his mouth is not from the tea’s bitterness. “ — it seems that I made a grave error in sending him to live with his aunt and uncle. I thought, and I realize now how very wrong I was, that they would overcome their prejudices and raise him as their own. He was a very charming baby, as I’m sure you recall. I admit, I have known there to be great evil in this world, but still I foolishly believed that the Dursleys would not fail in their duty to that boy.”

The Dursleys: Remus had met them once, at Lily’s father’s funeral. The woman, Petunia, heartbreakingly cold to the sister who still loved her, had refused even to look at Harry, six weeks old and the most precious baby Remus had ever seen. She had left her own baby with a sitter to keep him from James and Lily. “We used to be each other’s favorite person in the world,” Lily told Remus after the service, her face pale with grief. “I’ll never understand why it has to be like this.” Petunia’s husband had been all bluster and arrogance, with his bullying tone and his racist jokes. He hated that James was black almost as much as he hated that he was a wizard. In the middle of the service he could be heard muttering to his wife, his voice carrying easily across the church, about how typical it was that “his sort can't even brush their filthy hair for a funeral.”

Sirius had leapt from his seat, crossed the aisle of the tiny church in three long strides, and punched Vernon Dursley in the mouth. 

(Afterwards, Remus had fought with him about it, because the baby was still crying from the sound of Dursley’s shouts and Lily’s sister would never speak to her again, and _can’t you think before you act_ , and Sirius had called him heartless, gasping out _how can you be so fucking unfeeling_ , like he was a breath away from calling him something worse. Just another fight in a long string of fights, Remus turning silent and cold, Sirius growing righteous in his anger, drawing the argument out between them the way they’d once drawn out kisses and sex and the innocent embraces of their school days. Their fury and their wounds were all that were left to them, in the war. 

That’s what Remus thought at the time, that it was the war, the stress, the losses, and maybe, maybe when it was over, they could at least be friends again. How little he had understood.)

The Dursleys had stormed out of the funeral, bellowing, and left Lily to bury her father alone.

Remus clenches his jaw, sick at the thought of Harry raised by those cruel and viciously ordinary people. Dumbledore should have known better.

“What have they done to him?”

“As little as possible, it seems. I’ve learned through Arabella Figg that the Dursleys wish to give Harry up entirely, now that some of his power has started manifesting. They believe it will draw too much negative attention upon them. At first I thought I might persuade them otherwise, but when I saw the reality of the situation, the child’s living conditions … ” Dumbledore, cutting himself off with an angry sigh, sets his tea aside and rises from his seat like a tower soaring above the skyline, perfectly straight and terribly tall. His gaze, unrelenting, almost sees inside of Remus. “I thought perhaps you might raise Harry.”

“Me?”

“Who better? I had my reasons for sending him to the home of his relatives, but I am not so hard-headed an old man that I can’t admit when a plan is not working.” He grasps Remus’s shoulder, hard enough that Remus knows better than to interrupt or disagree or turn away. “You were James and Lily’s best friend. You ought to have been the godfather to their child.”

“But I’m not.”

“No. You are not. We were all deceived by Sirius Black.” Remus does not flinch at the name, but it’s an effort; it's the first time he's heard it spoken in years. “However, knowing what we now know, would you not agree that Lily and James would want you to raise their son?”

What Lily and James would want, he cannot say. Lily and James are dead, were only twenty-one when they died, beautiful and in love and practically children themselves, and they were optimists and fools, perhaps even fools enough to think Remus fit to raise their child, but Remus, now almost thirty, with the weak body of a man even older, has lived lifetimes longer than them and cannot be so naive. A werewolf raising the Boy Who Lived: the thought is too absurd to bear.

“Remus,” Dumbledore says. His blue eyes cut like ice. “Harry needs you.”

“No!” Remus, trembling, realizes that he is angry, angrier than he’s been in years, almost as angry as he was those first nights after the Ministry let him go and he burned every scrap that that Sirius had left behind, every photograph, every sock, every scarf. That Dumbledore would ask this of him, expect this of him, after all this time, after all these years without a word, without a sign; that Dumbledore would beg this favor, knowing as he does that if Remus could not protect James and Lily and Peter, then he sure as hell can’t protect Harry; it is insanity, it is heartless.

“What Harry needs,” Remus says, wrenching away from Dumbledore’s grip, “is to be as far away from danger as possible.” He stares up at the net of rafters overhead and, counting to ten, tries not remember Harry in his arms, crying quietly, while Sirius leaned over his shoulder and cooed. When he speaks again, his voice is soft. “You know what I am. You know that I can’t possibly — ”

“Arrangements can be made on full moons, I’m sure.”

Remus turns around. “Oh, do you suggest I hire a nanny? With what money? For that matter, what money am I meant to raise Harry on?”

“Harry has money. His parents left him — ”

“ _James’s_ money? I’m not going to — ”

Dumbledore holds up a hand and Remus falls silent. “I understand your qualms, Remus, but I ask that you hear me out, all the way to the end. All right? As I have already removed Harry from his aunt and uncle’s house, I do need to find someone to look after him for the time being at least. Don’t worry — he’s safe. He’s at Hogwarts as we speak, being fawned over by Poppy Pomfrey, but I think it would be good for him to be with someone who knew his parents, who can talk about what happened to them. Alas, it seems his Muggle relatives did not even see fit to tell him about magic, the wizarding world, or the deaths of his parents. Hagrid has explained what he can, but you knew James and Lily far better than the rest of us.”

Nodding — not in agreement, exactly, but simply to show that he’s listening — Remus turns this over in his mind. “What did the Dursleys tell him had happened to James and Lily?”

“An automobile accident.”

In a way it might be better for Harry to believe that than to know the whole, ugly truth. If only Remus could believe something so simple, so benign, had caused their deaths. At least then he would not feel so culpable, and Peter might still be alive. At least then, perhaps, Sirius wouldn’t have — 

But it doesn’t matter. If Harry is to attend Hogwarts one day, as he surely is, it will all come out eventually. It will always be a part of his story, his legend, the Boy Who Lived. And Remus doesn’t have it in him to forget Lily and James’s murders, their last stand against the great terror of the wizarding world. Harry deserves to know that his parents were heroes — by far the bravest people Remus had ever known.

“I know that you are wary of causing the boy more harm, but I must tell you: he is a bright, kind, good child, and more resilient than you think. It is a great shame that you do not know him, or he you.”

His eyes sting, his chest aches, but his voice is calm when he says, “I can’t.”

“At least come with me to see the boy. Even if you won’t take guardianship of him, you might still be a part of his life.”

Remus shakes his head. “I can’t,” he says again, “I _can’t_ ,” and Dumbledore, sighing, only says, “Very well.”

  


* * *

  


It’s been five years since Remus has seen anyone from the Order. After James and Lily, after Peter, and Voldemort's downfall, no one thought much of him. No one was left to think of him, except the Aurors who were certain he’d been involved somehow. But Remus had survived his interrogation, the knowing digs at his “recent cohabitation” with known murderer Sirius Black, the snarls of mongrel and monster, his own tired repetition, yes, I am a werewolf, no, I did not help Sirius Black, no, I am not a Death Eater, yes, I am a werewolf, yes, since I was a child, no, I did not help him. No, I would never, I would _never_. He still can’t remember how long it went on, the questions, the flushed, angry faces of his interrogators, but eventually Dumbledore arrived at the Ministry with an order for Remus’s release, signed by the Minister of Magic himself. Dumbledore collected Remus’s wand, offered his condolences, assured him that Harry was safe, and deposited him, exhausted, back at his flat, the very one Sirius had stormed out of two months earlier.

“Have they sent him to Azkaban?” Remus asked Dumbledore before he left.

Dumbledore sighed and looked down at Remus over the top of his glasses. “Yes.”

Automatically, Remus lit a fire beneath the kettle on the stove. His wand hand barely shook. “You're certain — certain he did it?”

“I am very much afraid so, Mr. Lupin.”

Remus nodded, slumping into the nearest chair, and found he could not say anything else. He wished for sleep, or something deeper than sleep, darkness, infinity, to be pulled beneath the folds of the earth where his mind could at last rest and there would be no more memories and no more doubts, only, after twenty-one long years, quiet, peace. After some time, he realized that Dumbledore had gone and his kettle had boiled dry.

He checked the date on the newspaper: the third of November, 1981. Just over a week until the full moon.

  


* * *

  


In the days that follow Dumbledore’s visit, Remus’s solitude stretches thin, and the pigs and the horses, the other workers and the soft-spoken old Muggles who give him food and shelter in exchange for his labor, abruptly feel like not enough. He misses his friends, misses them the way the sun-cracked desert misses water: not a mere hollow ache, but sharp, persistent, unforgettable. There is another worker on the farm, apparently a regular every summer, maybe half a decade older than Remus, with a broad Welsh accent and a rolling laugh like thunder. More than once Remus catches himself wondering what might happen if he followed this man home, to his little shack on the edge of the property, with its strung-up game in the windows and a pit for fire in the back. He doesn’t think he’s imagined the probing interest of his eyes on Remus’s back every now and then.

But in Dylan’s smile every smile Remus has ever known rises up behind it like a ghost, and he can’t bring himself to move one step closer to him.

One night he dreams of the Gryffindor common room, the flickering embers of a fireplace, James and Lily like columns of light, laughing together, the feeling, almost solid, almost tangible, of their love — for each other, for him, for life. He dreams also of their house in Godric’s Hollow, as it was before Voldemort’s curse rebounded and destroyed it, still warm and cluttered; they’d all gathered there for Harry’s first Christmas, and he can see it all even now, the tree sparkling in the corner, the fairy lights glowing, and Lily tipsy from eggnog, her hair the color of fire, and Sirius with a stuffed animal tucked under his arm for the baby. A dog, of course, with a red bow around its neck. Remus had bought Harry a Muggle picture book, one he remembered his mother reading to him when he was a little boy, and that evening after presents and laughter and more food than he’d eaten in months, he’d leaned over Harry’s crib and read the whole thing in low voice, while James and Lily dozed on the couch. “Maybe you should sing?” Sirius suggested, when Harry was still blinking up at him even when the book was over and done with, so Remus had, an old lullaby, the words of which he barely remembered, sung as softly as he could manage while Sirius smiled on, his hand warm between Remus’s shoulders, and Harry, sweet and fragile and precious, at last closed his eyes to sleep.

A happy memory. Before everything started splitting to pieces. Before the war claimed them all.

Had Sirius already decided then, that he would betray James and Lily? That he would murder Peter? Had he already joined with the Death Eaters, taken his place in Voldemort’s inner circle, the Black heir returned to the fold? Or maybe that was that all still to come, in the months of hell that followed, the missions, the rumors, the rising tally of martyrs and victims, defectors and enemies, all the friends and classmates and fellow Order members who disappeared, were tortured, were murdered, and everyone living with the knowledge that any one of them could be next. Every kiss they shared, every smile, every joke, felt like the last. 

Back then Remus was afraid to die, to leave those he loved so dearly, but he was prepared for it. He had known, after all, that it would come for him sooner or later; ever since the bite, he has lived in death’s shadow. He could’ve died, would’ve died, for any of them, and almost did twenty times over, but somehow he eluded death’s grasp once again, just as he did as a boy, and just as it was then, survival is its own kind of curse: he’s been forced to keep walking, even with the hands of the dead wrapped around his ankles, their weight dragging behind him with every step, and in his dreams he feels, above all, their anger that he did nothing to prevent their murders, that he slept for years beside Sirius in bed and never suspected, not for a moment, and then when it all came to pass, their lives lost protecting Harry, James and Lily and Peter slaughtered for the sake of that child they all loved so deeply, Remus never once reached out to him, never tried to see him. After Dumbledore left him that November day in the barren silence of his flat, Remus’s life, whatever was left of it, turned colorless, empty. The wizarding world was bursting with joy that the war had ended and astonishment at the flair with which it had been done, and Remus could not face all those faces split open by sheer relief; but neither could he face the seemingly infinite depths of his own misery. He could not stay in that flat full of corpses. Nor could he return to the home of his father, a man who had not really loved him since he was six, a place he had not been welcome in many years. 

Easier by far to turn his face away from all of it, retreat from the world, from the living with their hard-won happiness, as well as from the sacrificed, the dead.

But Harry — Harry is not dead.

When he wakes at dawn to check on the animals, he already has a headache that reaches all the way down through his molars and there are tears on his face, and all he can think, as he presses his glass of cool water to his forehead, is that he needs to owl Dumbledore.

He has no owl of his own, of course; could never afford one, just used the school owls at Hogwarts and borrowed Sirius’s off him in the years after. And by the time Sirius left — another row, not so different from all the others, Sirius’s mercurial temper, inflamed by liquor, Remus’s silence sharp as a blade, their love, a rotten thing now, noxious, putrescent, and when Sirius climbed onto his motorbike and flew away, his shoulders rigid and his face white, Remus did not realize for many days more that it really was the end — but by the time he was gone, Remus needed only to communicate with Order members and owling had long since been deemed too risky, too easily intercepted, anyway.

And since he left the wizarding world behind, he has hardly needed an owl. Who would he write to? Who would write to him? In all these years he has received a single letter from Andromeda Tonks (a very kind note after Remus’s father died, to which he’d never replied), a few heartbreaking bits of correspondence from Peter’s mum, and his annual letter from the Werewolf Registry at the Ministry, demanding updates on his address, occupation, relatives, and known associates. Every year he has less and less information with which to reply; yet it is only from these compulsory replies that he knows that there’s a small owl post office in Holyhead, reasonable rates, with a flock of barn owls named after the gods and goddesses of Greek mythology.

When he Apparates there during his lunch break that afternoon, he hands over a few coins and his letter, hastily scratched out with a ballpoint pen in the pink wash of the morning’s light, and the clerk behind the counter ties it to the foot of an owl called Thetis. “Direct reply or pick-up here?” the witch, a sleepy-eyed woman much older than Remus, with white hair and a bored voice. “Or no reply expected?”

“Direct reply.” Remus hands over another coin to cover the reply fee, thanks the woman, and Apparates back to the farm, the privacy of the barn, where the crack of his reappearance spooks the horses. Barely a minute later Dylan arounds the corner, whistling, holding a flecked red apple in his hand that he says he saved just for Remus.

  


* * *

  


Professor Dumbledore — 

For all the reasons we’ve already discussed, I cannot act as Harry’s guardian, but you are right that I’d like to see him. For James & Lily’s sake I wish to be certain that he’s all right & settled properly this time. I ought to have done it years ago & should have warned you off the Dursleys then. However I will only visit if you truly believe it would cause no harm or confusion or upset. If my presence is in any way likely to distress him, tell me so. I will not cause him any more pain for my own selfishness.

R.J. Lupin

 

Dear Remus,

I was very pleased to receive your letter.

Quite the contrary of your fears, I am confident that your acquaintance can do little but enrich the child’s life. I am afraid to say that until now he has been rather short on friends, but his great affinity for people has not been squashed in spite of the rather poor examples of people with whom has been living. It is no surprise that the staff here at Hogwarts has already grown tremendously fond of the boy, and he of them. (He and Rubeus Hagrid were very fast friends, I am happy to report.) I do not doubt that he will take to you with the same keenness.

As you know, term starts in but weeks, so we are on something of a tight schedule before the delightful chaos of a new school year begins. Of course you will also be busy in coming days. Do you feel you’ll be fully recuperated by the 25th of August? Shall we say noon at the Three Broomsticks?

I am, yours most sincerely,

Albus Dumbledore

  


* * *

  


With a hoot, Thetis takes Remus’s proffered coin and allows him to tie his single-sentence response to her leg. His heart constricts between his lungs as he watches her fly away. Nine days until he will see Harry again.

Until then: another full moon.

It strikes him like a bitter wind. He can’t stay here.

Yesterday Dylan laid his hot hand on Remus’s thigh and pressed his dry lips to Remus’s mouth, and though Remus knew better, he’d allowed it, just for a moment, just long enough to trick himself into believing he could, he might, let this happen, let Dylan happen. He’s slept with a few men since Sirius, few enough that he could count them on one hand, though he couldn’t tell you their names, couldn’t say much about them at all — how they’d looked, how they’d smelled, how their fingers had felt on his skin. That first year after Peter and James and Lily died, everything blurred together, anger and sickness and sadness, and the stupid ways he’d tried to forget. He took up smoking that year. He thought often of suicide.

But Dylan is different than those smudges of men he met in back-alley London bars, amidst a haze of drink and smoke; he has shared meals with Dylan, dawn breakfasts before their work began, lunches comprised of sandwiches and strong tea; he has seen Dylan’s gap-toothed smiles and warm blue eyes, has grown used to the flash of his pale ginger hair beneath the summer sun. Remus knows him — only a little, of course, but that little is still too much, too close for comfort; that little bit still demands more than Remus can ever, will ever, give.

He has to leave — now, today. The full moon rises in two days, and after that, a few days, maybe even a week, in which his frail body won’t hold up to the work that’s expected of him, and he can’t have well-meaning men like Dylan asking gentle questions Remus can’t answer. Better to leave the farm now, find somewhere isolated for his transformation, and never return. There will be other jobs, other farms or shops or factories willing to give him a day’s wage. And the truth is (he’s known it all along; known it since he woke from the attack and he saw the grim set of his father’s mouth, the redness of his mother’s eyes) this type of labor won’t be possible for much longer. Three-fourths of the month Remus is strong enough to manage, but with every moon that waxes he wakes with with new aches, new cracks, bones that haven’t set quite right, an arrhythmic flutter in his heart that can only be a bad sign. His health is not yet wrecked, but it’s close, worse in these past five years than in all the years before it, and at barely twenty-six he has nearly reached the limits of his body’s capabilities. If he keeps pushing ...

No use thinking about that now. The answers, for the moment, are clear: pack his things, few as they are; leave the farm behind, Apparate further up the coast, perhaps, to the woodland in which he’s spent more than a few nights; endure another full moon; recover as well as he can; and a week after that, he’ll go to Hogwarts, he’ll see Harry.

He tells the Muggle owners that his mother’s taken ill and he has to hurry to her side, that threadbare old excuse, the same one he’d used all of his first year at Hogwarts, but the Muggles are sympathetic, consoling. “Of course you’d best be off then,” the woman says, patting his arm. “You’re a good lad.”

“I know it’s not good timing,” Remus begins. 

“Nonsense,” says the man. He scratches his beard and glances sideways at his wife. “We’ll make do. We’ll hire someone from the village. You see to your mum. And you’re welcome back next summer if you find yourself in our neck of the woods.”

“Yes indeed, you are. Now, you’ll be needing a ride into town. There’s a coach from there runs twice a day. Dylan could — ”

Remus shakes his head. “I can make it on my own, thank you. Goodbye.”

He carries his trunk of belongings — clothes, chains, a few books — into the barn and checks that he is alone, save the horses, heads bent low, and an old calico mouser sleeping on the workbench. Near the cat he sees the mug Dumbledore drank from when he visited, emblazoned with the red WRU emblem, and his own preferred mug, blue with a hand-painted rooster on the side. He has been here long enough to have a preferred mug, long enough to have earned the affection of his employers, long enough that he doesn’t want to go. It’s this feeling, more than anything, that spurs him on. He knows better than to grow attached to anything now.

He Disapparates to a secluded wood, miles and miles away from the little farm, where it is cool and damp and the air smells of nothing human. He sets up wards, silencing charms, a test run before the full moon. He boils water for tea and, as he has done all these long years, he drinks it alone.

  


* * *

  


There was a time when Remus believed he might have a future. It washed over him, an unusual optimism, one evening at Hogwarts, midway through his seventh year, as he lay sprawled in his four-poster thinking of Sirius’s lips and the way they felt against his neck, and the way his hair tickled against Remus’s cheek as they kissed in the dark of an empty classroom. He and Sirius were in love, so he thought. James and Lily were too. Peter was not in love, not since Florence Merryweather broke up with him in September because she wanted to focus on her N.E.W.T.s, but he was happy nonetheless, having at last been let on the Quidditch team after the graduation of one of the Beaters the year previous. Not to mention he’d managed to land an interview for a minor position in the Ministry’s Foreign Affairs office.

All of them had begun to think about life after Hogwarts. James’s plan — if professional Quidditch player fell through — had always been to live off his parents’ wealth until something interesting came along, but now that Lily was talking seriously about pursuing Magical Education, James was too. “I can’t _believe_ it,” Sirius had said with a dramatic sigh over dinner. “Our James, our Prongs, becoming _one of them_.” He glanced ominously toward the High Table.

“Oh, stuff it,” James said, tossing a roll at Sirius’s head. Sirius caught it and bit into it happily.

Later, in the empty classroom, between kisses and whispers and wandering hands, Sirius said, “He’ll be good at it, won’t he?”

Despite the non sequitur, Remus knew just what he meant. “He’ll be brilliant, I’m afraid. James is a natural teacher if ever there was one.”

“And you?” Sirius asked, suddenly.

“I’m much too shabby to be a teacher. Think how the students would laugh.”

Sirius grinned, his teeth large and white and even, so much nicer than Remus’s crush of teeth, grown stranger and crookeder with each transformation. “No, I mean, what’ll you do? After?”

“Oh. Not much of anywhere will hire me, you know.” He looked at his feet. “I suppose I could always go back and live with my dad. It wouldn’t be so — ”

“No. Moony, you’re not going back there. I won’t have it.” Sirius’s grey eyes glimmered in the dark, sending warmth all through Remus’s body, all the way down to his toes. “You should live with me.”

“And what exactly will you be doing?” Remus asked, his voice cool, though he knew Sirius could feel how warm he was.

“Who cares? I’ll find something. And you can — you can work a Muggle job,” he said in a sudden rush of inspiration. Remus didn’t have the heart to explain about how even Muggle jobs wouldn’t let you take a whole week off every month off for strange illnesses. “Or you can sponge off of me. You can be a kept man. I don’t care. As long as I’ve got you — ” He broke off, embarrassed, and kissed Remus again instead of finding the words.

Later that night as Remus thought it over, he decided that he wouldn’t return to Wales, to his father’s cabin and all its unhappy memories. He knew how his father would look at him if he turned up, his tired eyes, his mouth set tight into a line to disguise the fear; the disappointment that he tried — though not very hard, not anymore — to hide every time Remus returned home, scrawny and scarred and inhuman. He’d never really accepted that Remus was the same boy who’d been playing, innocent and unlucky, in the light of a full moon ten years earlier. He’d loved that boy. He did not love Remus.

No, with his mother dead, there was nothing for Remus in Wales. He would live with Sirius in London. They would share a flat — share a bedroom. And Sirius would find a job; he was too brilliant not to. Remus would find something. Surely there was a Muggle shop somewhere in the city that might accept his odd schedule. James and Lily would get certified to teach. Peter would work at the Ministry and live nearby. They would be happy. It was clearer to him than anything he’d ever seen in Divination.

But it was only months later when the first disappearances were registered, initially with qualified concern, then with increasing alarm. Then the Dark Mark began to appear. James’s parents were murdered that year, and the Prewett brothers. Regulus died, was presumed dead, the year after that, 1979, and when Sirius found out he drank a bottle of firewhisky to himself and spent a night at St. Mungo’s. By then all thoughts of Foreign Affairs and Magical Education and Muggle shops with forgiving managers had been forgotten. By then they were fighting a war full-time, and the only happiness Remus knew could be found in his and Sirius’s little flat, their warm bed, their slice of home. James paid most of their rent for them (Sirius’s money from his Uncle Alphard couldn’t last forever) but he never said anything, never complained about the extra expense, not even when he and Lily announced, half-giddy with panic, that they were going to have a baby.

  


* * *

  


He wakes in stages, naked and shivering with pain. Last night’s transformation was worse than usual, the wolf more ruthless in its attempt to escape its bonds. At some point he pulled one arm free of the constraints — it feels oddly dislocated at his side now, though that should right itself soon enough — and the sticky blood on his face means he clawed himself, quite deeply from the feel of it. His back has been scraped raw against the tree bark, and the silver chains around his torso and arms have left their usual blistering wounds.

It takes him a long time to gather than energy to undo the locking charm on the chains, and another quarter of an hour to summon his trunk to his side. From within he pulls out a small quantity of dittany — he can’t afford much of it — and applies it with his good hand to the gaping wound across his face; the edges, still quite wet, run from his left cheek across his nose and up to his right eyebrow. He’s lucky not to have taken out to his own eye. He swallows a mouthful of a third-rate wound-cleansing potion (he’s got a quarter of the bottle left) and, tapping his wand against the wounds he can reach, he mutters the healing spells his mother forced his father to teach him when he was just a boy. They barely work against wounds left by the wolf, but the silver marks improve slightly. He drinks his canteen of water and closes his eyes against the pain.

When he wakes again, it’s nearly evening and he’s ravenous. His arm, though stiff, has righted itself, but his face stings more than ever, and the skin on his back flames in protest when he pulls on a shirt. He’s in no shape to Apparate somewhere for food, even if he had the money to spare, but he packed a hard loaf of bread and a few thick-skinned oranges, all of which he devours despite the way the juice stings his fingers. Lastly he pulls from the bottom of his trunk the remains of a chocolate bar; he peels back the foil and slowly breaks off a piece of the soft chocolate, which, even stale as it’s grown, still rings like a bell in his mouth, a note of burnt caramel lingering in the aftertaste. He sleeps once more.

It takes him longer than usual to recover, and when, late the next day, he Apparates to a nearby village, it is hunger more than anything that motivates him. He still can’t afford much — a day-old sandwich at half-price, a tin of green beans that he’ll heat back in the seclusion of the woods, a pack of earl grey teabags. Remus has learned to make himself small, common, not worth noticing, but the villagers make no secret of their interest in him, and when he catches his reflection in a window he knows why: his face, even with the dittany, has clearly been rent with a long, puckered line; it’s faded, but gruesome. Remus has always been a plain man, awkward and knobby beside his handsome friends, and crosshatched with scars he tried not to see in the mirror, scars he always tried to cover with his hands when Sirius looked at him. Now, though, he thinks he may be truly ugly, the gash across his face terrible and captivating, and the sight of it, the sight of him, sets the villagers on edge.

Back at his campsite, he eats his food, drinks his tea, and points his wand at his face once more, repeating all the healing spells he knows. He doesn’t care if he’s ugly, not really; he never expected anything else, and what would he want with good looks anyway? But he wants the wound to heal, to fade, as much as it can in the remaining days before his visit to Hogwarts.

He can’t meet Harry with a face like a nightmare.

  


* * *

  


The morning he is due to meet Dumbledore, Remus packs his trunk and spells himself clean. It doesn’t feel as good as a real shower, but it does the job. He drinks tea for breakfast, his stomach feeling small and hard as a walnut as he swallows it down.

He arrives early. At first the sight of Hogsmeade, lit with butterscotch sunlight, warms him through: the same old shops, the cobblestone streets, the witches and wizards in their robes and their hats. There’s the Post Office — there’s the bookshop where Remus spent so much time — there’s the little tea shop that banned them all after James and Sirius flung a pot of clotted cream at a group of Slytherins. But there is so much magic here it itches at him, and, more than that, the familiarity of these streets, these sights, hooks him just between his lungs and pulls him sharply back to childhood, happiness, those days spent in step with his friends, taking for granted their presence at his elbow, or just ahead, the shapes of them like lights to guide him onward. 

Not far from here, he knows, the Shrieking Shack waits, abandoned. Silent. 

He moves, his knees creaking, toward the Three Broomsticks. In the shop windows he sees his own warped reflection, still ugly, before he slides his eyes away.

The pub is warm and half-full when he enters, patrons drinking from tankards of Butterbeer and mulled mead, and eating platefuls of beans and potatoes that Madam Rosmerta, hardly changed, sets before them with a wink. When she spots him, and his little trunk floating behind him, she asks, “Need a room for the night?”

Remus shakes his head. “Just passing. Do you mind if I put this somewhere safe for the afternoon?”

“Not at all, I’ll put it in the back. Why — Remus Lupin, isn’t it?” Her expression goes soft all over, and he can see her eyes flickering over his scars, his graying hair — she’ll assume they’re from the war, of course — and worse, he can see all the things she wants to say, about his dead friends, about how sorry she is, but all she does is smile a little sadly and flick her wand so that his trunk shuffles behind the counter, into a back room. “What’re you drinking?” she asks.

“Butterbeer. Thanks.”

He waits at a table in sight of the door, sipping his drink. It tastes better than he remembered, and he can’t afford another, so he savors it, and the feeling the taste brings with it: warmth, home. A few minutes past noon, a large figure lumbers into the pub, his shadow long and gray against the low-lit floor. Not Dumbledore, as Remus was expecting, but Rubeus Hagrid, who, upon catching sight of Remus, grins massively and waves. “Hello there!”

“Hagrid,” Remus says. He stands as Hagrid approaches the table. “Afternoon. I thought … ”

“Dumbledore sent me to collect you, hope tha’s all right. Good to see you.” He grasps Remus by the shoulder and pulls him into a quick, fierce hug. “It’s been _years_. Not since — ” His smile fades and he shakes his head. “Well, not fer a long time.” He looks over at Remus’s mostly-finished Butterbeer. “Have you eaten already? I can wait if you’re still — ”

“I’ve eaten,” Remus lies. “Let me just … ” He swallows the contents of his drink in a few quick gulps, pats his face with the cuff of his sleeve, and smiles at Hagrid. “Shall we?”

On the way out, he tells Rosmerta he’ll be back for his trunk later that afternoon. “Thank you,” he says again.

“That’s all right.” She waves him off with a wink.

The walk to Hogwarts is shorter than Remus remembers, even as he struggles to keep pace with Hagrid. Hagrid won’t stop talking — about the new crop of plants he’s got at his hut, and plans for the coming term, and the pup he adopted (“Fang, he’s a beaut,” he all but sighs). He talks about Harry too. As they walk the path to Hogwarts and across the misty grounds toward the castle, he keeps up a running commentary: “Sweetest boy you’ve ever met, if y’ ask me. Got his dad’s looks, but he reminds me more of Lily. Sharp like her. Same sense of humor. A bit quiet but it could just be all that time with those blasted Muggles. Did Dumbledore tell you how they were treating him? Had him locked in cupboard! Barely feeding him too. He was skin ’n’ bones when I first saw him. I could’ve wrung those Dursleys’ necks.”

At one point, Hagrid asks, “How have you been, Remus? All right?”

“Yeah, all right,” Remus says quietly and lets him keep talking about Harry. A cold needle pierces his heart ever deeper with each word.

The castle is emptier than Remus has ever seen it, empty of students, the corridors silent but for Hagrid’s thunderous footsteps. Past the Great Hall, past the path to Dumbledore’s office (Remus remembers it still, that day his sixth year, after that bad full moon and James telling him what had happened, what he’d almost done, and how as soon as he was well enough he climbed that spiral staircase and turned in his Prefect badge). Remus follows Hagrid to the Hospital Wing. There, Dumbledore stands waiting.

“Mr. Lupin, a pleasure to see you. I hope you’re well,” he adds, but his eyes slide politely past the faded scar on Remus’s face. “I’m sorry I couldn’t meet you myself but with I’ve been rather overwhelmed with preparations for the start of term.” He gestures Remus beyond those familiar doors to the hospital ward, toward the suite of rooms he belatedly realizes must belong to Madam Pomfrey. 

“I’ve told Harry a friend of his parents is coming by to see him. He’s quite eager to meet you.”

Remus presses his lips together and breathes deeply through his nose. His voice sounds even when he says, “I’m glad. Is he staying here?”

“Madam Pomfrey has been most generous while we try to figure out what to do with young Harry.”

Hagrid says, “She was even angrier than me when she saw what those Muggles did to that boy. You should’ve heard the names she called ‘em — ”

“I blush to remember,” Dumbledore says with the hint of smile.

“So she’s been healing him up, making sure he eats all he wants. Given him a room to himself, not a blasted cupboard.”

As Dumbledore reaches to open the door to Madam Pomfrey’s suite, Remus holds out a hand to stop him. “Wait, just — one moment.” 

Hagrid gives him a curious look, but Dumbledore just nods. “We’ll let Harry know you’re here, shall we? And you can follow shortly.”

They step inside, and though Remus can’t see anything past the solid wall of Hagrid’s shoulders, he hears the stern and familiar voice of Madam Pomfrey, raised in greeting, and as the door swings shut the sound, unmistakable, of a child’s polite hello.

_Harry._

  


* * *

  


After she and James told them about the pregnancy, over dinner one chilly winter night, Lily sat on the sofa by the window looking out at the sparse snowfall, white and silver beneath the half-formed moon. In the low light, her hair shone bronze; her freckles stood out on her pale cheeks. She startled when Remus sat beside her, and, when he did nothing but hold her hand, she said in a quiet voice, “You think we’re mad.” 

“No.”

“ _I_ think we’re mad.” She sighed, not quite looking at him. “It was an accident, you know. Of course you know. It’s obvious. And when we realized we thought, again? Now? It was bad enough that first year out of Hogwarts, but then I thought, my career’s going to start soon, the rest of my life’s going to start, I can’t possibly … Did James tell you?”

Remus shook his head.

“It wasn’t some secret. James’s mum came with James and me to St. Mungo’s.” Her smile cut a dimple into her cheek. “I loved that woman.”

He rubbed circles against her hand with his thumb. “You’re keeping this one, though?”

“We thought we wouldn’t. With the war, with everything that’s happening, how could we? But, god, Remus, I know it’s stupid and it’s mad, but I want to be a mother. And this might be my only chance. People are _dying_ — ”

“You’ll be fine, Lily. You both will.”

“People are dying. Things will get worse before they get better — anyone can see that. And perhaps it’s selfish of me and James, but we want a baby. We want a family. Now isn’t the perfect time but it may be the only time we get.”

Outside the snow sparkled as it fell, and the world seemed beautiful and peaceful and still. He gripped her hand a little tighter.

“Sirius will be godfather?”

Lily turned to him, her green eyes so bright they hurt. “Officially. If something did happen to me and James, we want the baby to go into his custody without issue. Nothing anyone could object to. No furry little problems.”

He smiled. “Of course I understand.”

“You’re obviously going to be just as important a part of the baby’s life as Sirius. You two will be his dashing uncles, spoiling him rotten and leading him straight into trouble, I just know it. And Peter, god, can you imagine how he’s going to dote? Our dear mouse is such a sap.”

Leaning over, Remus kissed her cheek. “You’ll be a great mother, Lily. The best. And James was basically born to be a dad.”

She beamed at that. “Wasn’t he just?” Pressing her hands to the small curve of her belly, she said, “Hear that, little one? The world may be a dangerous place, and your parents may be completely mad, and your uncle may be a werewolf — ”

“And your other uncle has fleas.”

“ — but you are already so loved.”

“What’re you two gossiping about?” a voice called from across the room. Sirius. He was leaning back in his chair, his feet kicked up on the dining table. His cheeks were rosy from lager, his smile white and sharp; that brightness in him that Remus had so loved, elusive since Regulus, since James’s parents, shone once more. “Is it baby names? Because if so, I have a few suggestions.”

James, swiping Sirius’s bottle and taking a swig, said, “ _You_ are not naming my son, Padfoot. I won’t have a son named some nonsense like Thor, or Thaddeus, or Fortinbras — ”

“I’m wounded,” he said, clutching his chest, “that you think I would ever suggest anyone name their child _Thaddeus_. Thor, on the other hand … ”

When Lily and Remus joined them at the table, Remus squeezed in next to Sirius, who put a hand on Remus’s knee, and Peter set a bottle down in front of him. “What was that all about, Moony? Lily all right? Come now, you know what I always say — ”

“ ‘Let’s blow something up,’ ” Sirius put in, doing a half-decent Peter impression.

Peter shook his head, grinning. “No, it’s like I always say: secrets don’t make friends.”

Remus turned to roll his eyes at Lily, but she’d tucked herself against James’s side and closed her eyes, her head against his shoulder, her hand relaxed across her stomach. Beside Remus, the heat rolled off of Sirius’s body, the smell of him, like leather and orange peel, unmistakable even beneath the stink of beer. Peter’s laughter, infectious, good-humored, filled the room. For a moment Remus caught James’s gaze, warm and brown and not entirely without fear, and when a small, private smile bloomed across James’s face, Remus’s heart clenched once, hard, and a shiver ran through him like a premonition.

  


* * *

  


After Voldemort’s defeat — after James and Lily and Peter died — Remus waited for the full moon to kill him. Those first nights the wolf was more vicious than ever; he remembered the stag, the dog, the rat, and he tore himself apart missing them. For months Remus woke in agony, and one day, he knew, he would not wake at all. 

Yet, month after month, he somehow, improbably, survived, until a year had passed, then two, until survival was mere instinct, and he worked, and he starved, and he buried his father in a cemetery by the sea; and even when it became more bearable, these tattered scraps of life that remained to him, even when he was moved by the kindness of strangers, who fed and sheltered him when he had nothing, and, in returning their kindness, even if only by offering an ear for their stories, a repository for the words no one else would hear, or giving them a word of sympathy when they needed it, he found the worn edge of his own soul — even then he wondered why was still alive. 

All these years, he has not stopped wondering, but he knows now. Maybe he’s known all along. He may have been little more than a phantom these past five years, but, like all ghosts, it’s because he has unfinished business. He has unkept promises.

He has Harry, waiting for him. Remus has to face him — now, right now, or he’ll never be able to do it.

He opens the door.

The room, when he enters, is warm, silent, the light from the lamps pale and yellowish, and though he feels several sets of eyes on him, all he can see is the boy in round spectacles and an oversized red jumper, the boy who looks so much like James did that first day at Hogwarts — a lifetime ago — as he sat beneath the brim of the Sorting Hat, but this child, barely six, is much smaller, far too skinny, and the quiet curiosity on his face is all Lily.

“Hello, Harry,” Remus says.

“Hello,” Harry says. Then he scratches a hand through his hair in a way that is all too familiar, revealing the jagged line of his scar, and tentatively he asks, “Is it true you knew my parents?”

Remus nods. “I knew them very well indeed.”

Harry’s expression wavers on the edge of something brighter, more ebullient, but — where James would’ve laughed, and Lily would’ve asked another question — all Harry says is, “Cool.”

One word, and Remus falls.

“Perhaps you’d like some time to talk, just the two of you?” says a voice — Dumbledore’s, Remus realizes, blinking up at him. Beside him, Madam Pomfrey opens her mouth to object, but Dumbledore continues, “We’ll let you have the room. Half an hour, do you think?”

Half an hour won’t be long enough — half a day won’t be long enough — but Remus watches them go without saying a word. Hagrid is last out, and shuts door the behind him. 

Remus turns once more to Harry. His heart feels like it’s on fire.

“Could you tell me about them?” Harry says.

“Anything you like,” says Remus, the words automatic. He takes another deep breath and crouches down to Harry’s height, and when Harry looks him in the face, scarred as it is, he doesn’t startle, doesn’t flinch. He just keeps looking.

Remus smiles. “I’ll tell you anything you want to know.”

And every reason Remus had for why he can’t do this, couldn't do this — not only see Harry, speak with him, but raise him, take care of him as James and Lily once asked him to, love him with every piece of his brittle, broken heart — vanishes all at once. Every well-reasoned doubt and well-founded fear is struck down, razed, easily and instantaneously, by the joy that flares out of Harry’s bright green eyes.

**Author's Note:**

> Title from Joni Mitchell's "I Think I Understand":  
> 
>
>> Sometimes voices in the night  
> Will call me back again  
> Back along the pathway of a troubled mind  
> When forests rise to block the light  
> That keeps a traveler sane  
> I'll challenge them with flashes from a brighter time
>> 
>> Oh, I think I understand  
> Fear is like a wilderland  
> Stepping stones and sinking sand
> 
>   
> 


End file.
